The Power of Being Made Uncomfortable

You a college boy?

Last night we went to a screening of the documentary “Mr. Gaudino”.

It was a profile of Prof. Robert Gaudino, who was one of my teachers and the man who changed my life.

About 150 people turned out for the screening at The Princeton Club (The Williams Club has now merged with The Princeton Club – which gives us better facilities and it’s closer!)

Bob Gaudino died in 1974, so it’s a big surprising that now, 36 years later, people still turn up for this kind of stuff.

I encountered Bob Gaudino at Williams during my freshman year (1972) when I was 17 years old.

In my sophomore year, I took an intense one-year seminar with him on Classical Philosophy. We read deeply and extensively, from Plato to Kant to D’Alembert to Diderot to Montesque and so on…

Sometime in the second semester, Prof. Gaudino (who was dying of a neurological disease) pulled me aside and said, ‘you have to get out of here’.

He sent me away from the school to have what he called an ‘experiential education’.

This is not like the semester abroad that my nephew and so many other students do – where they go to Australia or England to go to school

No… this was something else.

This was education by immersion.

Gaudino sent me off to live with a very poor family in Lick Branch Hollow in Hazzard, Kentucky.

I took a job working for the Consolidated Coal Company.

I lived with them, as they lived.

After Kentucky, I went to Iowa and then took construction work building confinement breeders.

I left Williams a boy and came back a man.

Much changed.

Later, after I graduated, I won a Watson Foundation Fellowship and spent the next three years traveling around the world with a camera, living in Afghan villages, with Toureg Bedouin in the Sahara, with Tahposa tribesmen in the Sudan….

In each case, I did what I had done in Kentucky. I adapted their life, as best I could.

For more than 25 years, I have been practicing what Bob Gaudino taught me.  Current TV was very much a child of Bob Gaudino. The idea as to take a video camera and live with another culture and capture what their life was like.  The very first documentary film I ever made I went to live in a Palestinian Refugee Camp with a family.  Just like Kentucky.

Even the work we do with the 4-day video bootcamps: here’s a camera, go out and inject yourself into a story, is a child of Bob Gaudino.

The TV series we did for The Travel Channel – 5Takes was the idea of sending 5 people around the world with video cameras to inject themselves into uncomfortable situations and record it.

He had an impact. Maybe that’s why 36 years on, 150 people still show up.

There was a panel as well. Two other Gaudino ‘students’ were there.  Bill Loomis, former Managing Director of Lazard Frers, (who was also a Watson Fellow) and Matt Nimetz, Williams Grad, Rhodes Scholar, President of the Harvard Law Review and UN Special Ambassador.

Gaudino believed in putting students into situations that made them uncomfortable, that forced them to think – to see the world in a different way.

It has its benefits.

Gaudino, the film reported, felt his ‘experiential education’ projects (India and USA) were failures.

He wasn’t wrong about much, but he was wrong about that.

The only way to grow is to confront uncomfortable situations.

Today’s students don’t do that too much.

Today’s culture doesn’t encourage that either.

We don’t want anyone to ‘feel bad’.

We want everyone to be comfortable.

Sometimes, being made to feel uncomfortable is the better path.

Even if it doesn’t feel so good at the moment.